“Ghosts don’t return loans”—he waved the money at me—”with interest; loan-shark rates, too. Let me see … you gave her the money in August, no, she took it from you in August, this is December, four months … that’s forty percent per annum. You ought to be ashamed, bro”—he laid the money respectfully on my rolltop—”of exploiting the poor kid. Think of how many houses she had to haunt to make that money.”
“She’s probably a waitress somewhere.”
“A haunted restaurant? I can see the ads: ‘Ghoulish Goulash, served by the prettiest ghost girls this side of Transylvania. Bring your own garlic.’ ”
“Packy, it is not funny,” I said, but I was laughing too. “I prayed at her grave.”
“Someone benefited by your prayers, but not Maggie or Andrea or whatever her name is. I think I’ll picture her as Maggie, you wouldn’t fall so heavily for an Andrea.…”
“I did.”
“Only because she looked like a Maggie.” He considered the enlargement again. “A spectacular Maggie at that. No wonder Kate couldn’t hold your attention.”
“She’s dead, Packy. She’s haunting me.”
“Baloney.” He shook his head impatiently. “I don’t care what happened in those weird mountains or what grave you prayed at, these worn ten-dollar bills are as solid as gold, even with inflation. She’s alive somewhere and findable. What’s the postmark on the envelope?”
“Postmark?” I tried to focus my attention.… If Maggie really were alive …
“Sure.” Packy snorted impatiently. “Every letter mailed in the United States has the name of the post office from which it is sent, usually smeared and almost illegible, but we’ll make it legible and start searching there.”
“And I’m Don Quixote!”
“Shape up, sailor. Where’s the damn envelope?”
“I threw it away.” I rose from my desk chair, still disoriented and confused but beginning to hope.
“You did what?”
“I didn’t notice the money till today. I tossed the envelope in my wastebasket”—I searched frantically under the desk for the wire basket—”yesterday afternoon.”
Empty.
“You know Mom, a wastebasket with waste in it is as bad as an idle mind—both are the devil’s workshop. I suppose you didn’t notice the postmark.”
“I didn’t pay any attention.…”
“Well.” Packy leapt enthusiastically to his feet. “The garbage pickup isn’t till tomorrow morning. Let’s go out back and find her envelope.” He glanced at the notepaper. “It’ll be cheap stationery, she’s obviously been saving her nickels and dimes to pay you. More and more do I like this Maggie Ward. She’s certainly too good for you, bro.”
He rushed out of my room and banged down the stairs, like the overgrown adolescent ox he was. I straggled along after him, not caught up yet in his enthusiasm and not sure even that I wanted to renew my madcap pursuit of the elusive Maggie.
Still, I joined Packy in the chill, damp mid-December dusk as we hunted for an envelope that may have been mailed from beyond the tomb but had also certainly been sent through the United States Mail.
We had no trouble finding my little stack of white, beige, or red-and-blue-trimmed, 5-cent airmail envelopes. But none of them seemed to be from Maggie. I rushed back into the house to find the letters so we could match them.
“Bring a flashlight,” Packy yelled after me.
“Whatever are you and your brother doing out there in the garbage can?” my mother asked hazily as I ransacked the kitchen for a flashlight with batteries that worked.
“An envelope from a ghost.”
“Oh.” She considered my reply judiciously, spatula dipped in cake frosting in her hand. “Well, wear a jacket, don’t catch cold.”
I grabbed my Ike jacket and Packy’s Quigley basketball jacket and flashlight and, letters stuffed in my pockets, raced back to the alley. The adrenaline was pumping in my blood now. Packy’s enthusiasm had infected me. The chase was on.
“Hurry up, Don Quixote,” Packy demanded as I rejoined him, “the game’s afoot and we haven’t a second to lose.”
“Wrong book.”
“I’m not so sure.” He began to sort the letters and the envelopes into matching piles. “You better do this, Jer. I don’t know these people.”
It took a few minutes. Every letter was matched with an envelope. Left over was Maggie’s little piece of lined note paper.
“Damn the bitch,” I shouted, “she’s taken the envelope back.”
“Great.” Packy pounded me on the back. “You’re entitled to be angry. But in River Forest we don’t permit ghosts, and certainly not in our garbage cans. Did you tear it up, by any chance?”
“I might have.” I tried to remember, shivering now from the cold. “I don’t usually …”
“Let’s look for scraps of white paper.” He shoved the flashlight at me. “You hold this and I’ll go through the mess again.”
“I’m not sure that it’s worth it.” The beam of light was shaking as my hand trembled in the cold. The weather forecast said the temperature would drop to zero tonight. It was already dropping.
“Hold the damn thing still.” Packy was arranging several pieces of paper like a jigsaw puzzle. “This look like it?”
It was the right size and had the right feel. “I think so.”
“Now to find the postmark. I hope you didn’t tear it in half. Where the hell is it?”
We dug back into the heap of garbage searching for a few scraps of white envelope paper.
“I think this might be …” I held up a tattered bit of white.
“Aha.” Packy grabbed the scrap and my flashlight. “Oh my God! Look at this!”
The light was shaking in his hand too. But while the substation number was illegible, there was no doubt about the rest of the postmark:
December 13, 1946. Chicago, Illinois.
CHAPTER 34
“WE MUST GO ABOUT THIS SYSTEMATICALLY, WATSON.” Packy, who was enjoying himself altogether too much, it seemed to me, was seated at my rolltop, pencil in hand. “The girl has class, you say, despite her dime-store stationery. She has some experience waiting on tables. She works in elegant places like the Del Coronado and the Beverly Hills, so the first spots to investigate in Chicago are the quality restaurants in the best hotels—Pump Room, Empire Room, Boulevard Room, Beach Walk—and the top nightclubs—Chez Paree, College Inn, Rio Cabana, Latin Quarter, Vine Gardens, maybe even the Trianon and the Aragon. Would she maybe be a Chez Paree adorable?”
“She’s supposed to have a wonderful singing voice, but I can’t see her dancing in skimpy clothes.”
Pack glanced at my photo, which I had made from the slide, from which he had a hard time averting his eyes. “I won’t contend the point,” he said with a wink. “But I suppose we can write off the Silver Palm and the 606 Club.”
He tapped his pencil thoughtfully. “Why do you think she chose Chicago?”
“Because she is a clever little bitch.” I wanted to see her again, but I was very angry at her. “Right under my own eyes is the last place I’d look.”
“And yet she’d be close to you.”
“I guess I’d like to think that’s part of it.” I buried my face in my hands. Why had I ever become involved with the tiresome little wench?
“If she’s that clever,” Packy continued, so consumed by the excitement of playing detective that he was oblivious to my ambivalence, “she’d probably avoid the places where you might show up with a date—College Inn, Chez Paree, Aragon. We’ll try the hotels first.”
“A wig, glasses, makeup—she never wore it—might fool me if I wasn’t looking for her.”
“Is she that smart?”
“Very smart. And very scared. And, I guess, very confused.”
“How old did you say she was?” Packy picked up the photo.
“Eighteen, and, Packy, stop ogling that picture. She’s my girl.”
He thought that wa
s an outrageously funny remark. “Finders keepers, bro.” He turned the picture over, face down. “But I’m only looking for a sister-in-law to take care of you when I go off to the Big House next September.”
He grimaced, not liking the prospect of the seminary at Mundelein at all. With good reason.
“I wonder if the family will like her,” I mused, still not quite ready to organize the search. Or rather, to listen to Packy’s plan for organization.
He turned over the photo. “She’s crowded a lot of living into eighteen years, hasn’t she?”
I nodded. “A lot of tragedy.”
“They’ll like her,” he said confidently. “She’s Irish, she’s Catholic.…” He hesitated. “My God, Jer, she is a Democrat, isn’t she?”
“I didn’t think to ask … probably. She must be.”
“You didn’t ask?” My brother stared at me in disbelief.
“I don’t think so.”
“You certainly must have been in love!”
So Quixote and Sancho began their pursuit of Dulcinea in the bitter December cold before Christmas of 1946.
Or maybe it was Holmes and Watson in pursuit of the game that was afoot.
Dad was puzzled about this sudden joint social life of his two sons, but he only let us know that he had noted it. Mom observed that wasn’t it nice that the two boys were getting to be friends again.
We tilted at all the windmills in the Loop and the Near North Side (as Tower Town was now being called) in search for the dubious Dulcinea.
We were sorting through a haystack. Suppose that, for example, the day we sortied to Chez Paree on Fairbanks Court between Michigan Avenue and the Lake, and listened to Sophie Tucker and Bobbie Breen, it was Maggie’s day off. Or suppose that she had decided not to be a waitress. Or suppose she had been passing through Chicago when she mailed the eleven ten-dollar bills—paying loan-shark rates, as Packy had commented. Or suppose she was working in a suburban speakeasy turned gambling resort.
Suppose a hundred other possibilities. Once you’re on the chase, it becomes an end in itself.
Our technique varied. Usually Packy was the advance scout, peering into the restaurant or the nightclub over the maître d’s head in search for a plausible Dulcinea. He would then report to me in the lobby or outside in the bitter cold where I would be waiting. If there was someone inside who might be Maggie, we would bribe the maître d’ to find us a table and investigate more closely. At the Pump Room of the Ambassador East, I actually called the young woman with the crisp auburn halo “Maggie” and made her very angry indeed.
Packy cooked up a wonderfully sad story about a woman lost in the war to win her over to our side.
We listened to the music of Dick Jurgens, Art Kassel, Lawrence Welk, Ted Mills, and even Sol Perola at Colosimo’s, the Outfit joint out on South Wabash where I was sure Maggie would not work more than one day.
“Who knows what a young woman on the run would do?” Packy enjoyed the revue at Colosimo’s more than I thought a seminarian should.
We listened to swing, jazz, and even waltz music. We met some pretty and friendly girls, with whom Pack was very cautious, as a seminarian ought to be.
“I’d get thrown out if the rector knew I was here.” He dismissed his caution with an easy laugh. “Talking with a girl would mean excommunication reserved personally to the Pope.”
A couple of the young women would have been interesting date and even courtship material, if I were not chasing and being chased by a will-o’-the-wisp.
“Why do you shut up when they try to be friendly?” I asked my brother.
“I don’t want to pretend to be anything I’m not. Strictly off limits for those whose proximate goal, as we say in philosophy class, is husband, home, and family.”
“Fair enough.”
I hate to confess it, but we had a great time on our search. Good music, presentable entertainment, pleasant companions, the excitement of a quest with a brother whom you admire. The only problem for Quixote and Sancho was that we did not find Dulcinea.
We even investigated, very briefly at Packy’s insistence, the Silver Palm. “It would be a perfect hideout,” he argued.
He was disgusted by the show. I—God and the Feminist Movement forgive me—was both repelled and attracted.
None of the admittedly lovely young women, I insisted in my head, was as beautiful as my Maggie.
They were not, however, ugly.
“Let’s get out of here,” my brother insisted after the first number. “I think those poor kids are being used.”
“By their own choice, but okay. I told you Maggie wouldn’t be in a place like this.”
“Let’s try Ireland’s,” he suggested.
Ireland’s was a steak house more or less around the corner on Broadway, a legendary steak house, I would add, for a long, long time.
“That’s not a bad idea.” I rose from the table with him. “It’s classy and yet not on the beaten path exactly.”
There were more nightclubs in Chicago in those days because there was no TV. And fewer restaurants because not very many people could afford to eat out often and because the pleasures of expense account living had yet to be invented.
We both demolished mammoth steaks, drank a couple of beers (not strictly legal for my brother, but he was rarely carded), enjoyed discussing the prospects for our various teams next year, and had another entertaining evening.
But no Dulcinea.
So, despite the alluring images from the Silver Palm that continued to swirl in my head, we returned home to River Forest the Saturday night after the Bears victory discouraged.
“As I said, Pack”—we were sprawled in his room, drinking yet another beer—”we’re in the haystack. What if she was passing through on a train, remembered me, and threw the money in an envelope?”
“And just happened to have the right address?”
“Suburban phone book.”
“What if”—he sucked on his beer bottle, no cans then—”what if it really is money from the ‘other side’?”
“That’s always a possibility. Remember what Father Donniger said.”
“In principle.” He set the bottle down on top of his Greek dictionary. “That’s always a possibility, a final duty required by Saint Peter before she gets in the front door.”
“Or the Blessed Mother before she gets in the back door.”
“That girl is not the back-door type … oh, damn!” He jumped up enthusiastically. “We made a terrible mistake! We forgot the most obvious place of all!”
“What’s that?” All I wanted to do was to finish my beer, go to bed, and dream of the lovelies from the Silver Palm.
“The Camellia Room at the Drake!”
“Sweet-sixteen parties and golden-wedding anniversaries?”
“What better place for our Maggie? No passes, classy clientele, pleasant if dull setting, and little chance to find a single war veteran, under thirty anyway, sitting at your table. And they hire attractive young women who look like they’re finishing their college courses. Ideal! Lemme think. Yeah, they do serve late breakfast on Sunday mornings. Let’s give it a whirl! Eight o’clock Mass at Saint Luke’s, then we whip down Chicago Avenue and pretend we are really high-class tourists. Wear a tie, bro, and no Ike jacket or Wehrmacht coat.”
He dashed to the phone, dialed a call and carried on a conversation with someone at the Drake Hotel.
“No waitresses? Are you sure? Only men? Even during the war? But … yeah, I see.” He hung up. “Damn!”
“No waitresses at the Camellia Room?”
“I guess they’d defile the black and white tiles and the fake camellia trees.… I have the feeling Alexander Dumas would not be amused.”
“Alexander who?”
“Dumas. Fils, of course. The illegitimate son of Dumas pére. The Frenchman who wrote the book La Dame aux Camélias. You know, the book on which La Traviata is based. Hey, is this broad literate?”
“To put it mildly
.”
“Well, that’s good. Anyway, I’m frustrated. That would have been the perfect place for her … our own little Lady of the Camellias.”
“She likes operas,” I said.
“Yeah. Well, that won’t help us find her.… Wait a minute. I have an idea. I bet she’s in the Lantern Room, right next door. That’s a classy place too. Then she gets first shot at the Camellia Room, when they let waitresses in. Okay. I know they have a late breakfast too. It figures.”
It didn’t figure at all. It was rather a wild shot in the dark. I protested that I wanted to sleep late, but Sancho would hear none of it.
“Get thee to bed, the game’s afoot and we need our sleep!”
I protested weakly against this mixture of literary references but did indeed get me to bed. And dreamed not of the girls of the Silver Palm but of Maggie Ward.
Dressed like a girl at the Silver Palm.
My nightmares seemed to have been left behind at Superstition Mountain. I couldn’t quite remember when they had stopped; but apparently, save for occasional reruns when, to tell the truth, too much of the drink had been taken, my war dreams had submerged. For the moment.
“The drink being taken,” as anyone who is Irish knows well, is more than a couple of beers. My wife contends that it rarely happens with me, not because of any inherent virtue but because I fall asleep.
The sermon at Saint Luke’s the next morning was about “being home for Christmas”; the priest welcomed home all the vets who had not been home last year and reminded us that at Christmas home was wherever love was.
A proposition with which I was fully prepared to agree that morning. My reluctance to charge the windmill at the Lantern Room had been swept away by a great tidal wave of hope. Maggie Ward would be home for Christmas, I was convinced. Home meant River Forest.
Where, I told myself, she belonged.
Hope does not mean certainty; every other minute I doubted the common sense of the hope of the previous minute. As I drove carefully down slippery Chicago Avenue, dodging around the occasional poky streetcar, I hid my enthusiasm from Packy behind a mask of pretended sleepiness.
The Search for Maggie Ward Page 35
